"Emily, let me ask you something," Abraham said as we sat near a fire while some food cooked on it.
My mind wandered precisely at that moment and instead of answering, I began to wonder why we needed to eat. After all, it was not as if I needed it to survive at this point. So why?
I heard a chuckle and my eyes rose to meet the warm brown ones of the man sitting across from me.
"Haven´t you ever thought," Abraham asked, "that the easiest camaraderie comes around a nice meal? I don´t know exactly what it is about sharing food and nice moments with others but I find they always bring down any barriers. Don´t you think so?"
I looked down at my hands and smiled. Abraham was indeed correct. This time spent with Him had already brought more warmth to me than the fire itself.
"Yeah, you are right. I do not know what it is either, but this easy exchange indeed makes me feel mellow and calm."
I looked up and found that Abraham had been looking at me all this time and my heart squeezed tightly from the tenderness in His gaze.
"So… can I ask you something, Emily?" Abraham said again and I felt my cheeks becoming flushed with embarrassment. I now realized I had never answered His earlier entreaty.
"Yeah, sure, go ahead," I answered.
"Do you know the story of the dome of darkness and the white pearl?"
"Excuse me?" I asked nonplussed. I was sure there wasn´t such a story. At least not that I could remember and I had grown up in a family that thrived from telling every story under the sun, even if they were from a different culture to mine.
Again, Abraham chuckled.
"No, I have never heard of that story. Why do you ask?"
"Okay, then, do you know the importance of the saying, in the image and likeness of God? What does that one mean?"
I looked at the man sitting across from me and took some time to ponder on His questions while He handed me a plate of grilled fish and a couple loaves of bread. However, by the time I had finished eating I still had no answer that seemed to satisfy me completely. The truth was that I had never truly tried to decipher what those words, present in the Bible, truly meant and it seemed that I should know this.
Abraham did not pressure me to respond and He did not try to fill in the silence with unnecessary chatter. Instead, He allowed me to think in peace while I wondered what to answer. At long last, I attempted to give Him what I had.
"If I remember correctly from my school days and what my parents and grandparents taught me, that saying is in Genesis and it refers to how God – I mean You – created Man. The fun thing is that now that you ask me those two questions, the one on the story of the dome and the pearl and the saying in the Bible, I find that none of my answers would be satisfactory."
Abraham chuckled but I realized He was not making fun of me and this encouraged me to take a stab at a deeper answer.
"I think that when the Bible mentions the creation of man in God´s image and likeness it means that we were created to resemble You somehow. However, I never truly understood what that meant because You do not have a physical form – unless we are referring to Emmanuel – and… well… we are far from perfect… I have no idea what I´m talking about, to be honest."
"You are not far from a proper answer, my child. Indeed, Emmanuel is a very important – maybe the most crucial part – of that answer. So, if you are finished with your meal, I want you to please lay back on the ground and look up at the beautiful starry sky. Let me start with the story and keep my question on the image and likeness of humans to God in your mind. You´ll find the proper answer soon."
I did as He told me and laid back. To my astonishment, I found that the ground was very comfortable – almost as if a mattress of grass had grown beneath my body – and not cold at all. I looked up at the night sky and found myself marveling at the beauty of the stars twinkling like millions of diamonds above me.
"Once upon a time…" Abraham began to speak in the most soothing and relaxing voice, so that as I listened to Him a heavy sensation of sleepiness fell over me and I found myself drifting off. It took literally two seconds and I stopped hearing His voice and my mind took me off towards the darkness of a dream.
And boy if it was dark. I found myself inside a dark void where no sound and no light existed and it did not matter whether I looked up, to the sides, or below me, everything was blanketed by darkness.
Wishing to do something, I took a step forward, and as soon as I did the darkness moved and I found enough light to be able to see that I was standing at the very brink of a huge hole. Fear overpowered me and I tried to back up, but the more I tried the closer I got to the mouth of that neverending chasm.
"Let yourself go, Emily, I´ve got you."
At those words, I turned and found Abraham materialized right beside me.
"But if I fall into that gaping hole…" I did not complete my sentence, showing my fear with my words.
"I´ve got you. Never be afraid when you are with Me."
I looked back down at the mouth of the chasm and swallowed down my feelings. I was only human and it was normal for me to be afraid to let go. But if Abraham remained by my side and He promised that He would look after me and protect me, then I could let go. And I did just that.
Cold air and blanketing and oppressing darkness rushed by me as I began to plummet toward what I assumed would be the bottom of the hole and the further down I went the more oppression I felt. I could not see much anywhere and I realized that Abraham was not next to me. However, I felt Him close by me and this gave me the strength to continue.
Layer upon layer of impenetrable black passed me by as I descended and at some point, I began to wonder how long it would take me to reach the bottom. However, those thoughts disappeared when I became aware of the fact that the lower I went the worse the pressure became, almost as if I were being covered with heavy blankets. In a sense, I felt like Alice in Wonderland falling down the rabbit hole except that there was nothing adventurous about this. The feeling of oppression and the pressure around me took away any fun.
It seemed I had been neverendingly falling when I became aware of a change in my surroundings. From below my feet, I began to sense a change in colors and when I looked down I realized that the darkness had become pierced by a very soft gleam of white light. It was very little and it barely reached the layers above my head, but the light was already causing changes to the darkness, turning it from impenetrable black to dark grey. And the further down I went, the more the changes became clearer.
At some point in my drop, the white light became more prominent than the dark, and even though it did not manage to fully dispel it, it did make it turn into a soft grey almost like storm clouds around me and when I looked up, I realized that everything above me now looked as if I were underneath the dome of a football stadium, only this one had multiple ceilings.
Despite the changes in the coloring, I realized I had not stopped falling. When would this end?
"Look down Emily," Abraham´s voice came, and as soon as I followed His instructions, I released a gasp.
My body had stopped plummeting through this neverending tunnel and it had slowed down to more of a floating down and right below my feet I saw that the white light had now become prominent and pushed away the heavy and oppressing domes of darkness.
Sometimes, almost as if it were the slow thump of a heartbeat, the light pushed back against the dark surrounding it and the outer rings, the ones closest to the domes ebbed and flowed as if they were the surf in the ocean. Neither the darkness nor the light won against each other but it seemed they were in constant battle for the upper hand.
My body finally left behind the darkness and entered fully into the light and when I became accustomed to it I saw that at the very heart of the brightness stood a small but beautiful pearl, the purest I had ever seen, and it was from this pearl that the light came.
And then, my feet touched the ground and I found myself looking at the most astonishingly beautiful garden I had ever seen. Right in the middle of it stood a very tall mountain and at the top of it I saw a heavy white cloud from which lightning emerged and rained down harmlessly to touch the ground all around the garden. In fact, to my astonishment, I saw as life sprang forth every time the bolts touched the surface of the ground.
Without knowing what pushed me to do so, but attracted invariably, I found myself walking to the mountain and pretty soon my feet began ascending it. My heart beat really loud with excitement the higher I got even though I had no idea what was inside that cloud. However, it did not seem to matter in the least. Somehow, my heart seemed to know where I was going and why and I was willing to follow.
When I finally reached the mountaintop, my body was swallowed by the cloud cover, and a shiver went down my spine as my senses picked up the message that I had reached a very sacred place. Without even thinking of it too much I removed my shoes and overwhelmed by the emotions that ran through me at the Presence around me I fell to my knees.
"Do you understand what I am showing you, my child?" I suddenly heard Abraham´s voice booming around me and when I turned I saw Him standing close by.
I nodded because I mostly did. There had been no words spoken and no clues given and yet, somehow, I got most of what Abraham was showing me. The pearl I had seen was a human soul, in fact, my soul, and the mountain and the cloud were the representation of God´s presence in my soul. The garden, I surmised, was the result of God´s presence, and life sprang forth within me through the lighting but it also generated life outside as those rays of light from the divine life pushed through. The light outside the pearl, the one that pushed the darkness, was also the result of God´s light within my soul. So what was the darkness?
Suddenly, the light around me dimmed considerably and I looked around me alarmed. To my astonishment, I found myself outside of the cloud cover and at the foot of the mountain and I realized the cloud had disappeared. Some of the light from earlier remained, but it was much, much less than before, almost as if rain clouds had moved in front of the sun.
I looked around and realized that most of the beauty of the garden had dissipated and I turned to Abraham.
"Come with me," He said and led me to the edge of the garden until I found myself outside of the pearl.
"Look up," Abraham indicated and I did. Right above me, it seemed as if the dome of darkness was winning against the light and it was bearing down on it in an attempt to swallow the pearl whole. I became worried and looked at Abraham afraid.
When I looked back toward the garden, and the mountain, I realized that there were tendrils of darkness moving about, further darkening the landscape.
"We cannot let Man be lost," I heard a booming voice say around me.
I felt a hand against my arm and when I gazed down I realized that Abraham was guiding me back out of the garden. I followed Him without a word and He pointed upwards to the swirling darkness above me.
"What is that Abraham?" I asked.
"Just as you thought, it is the darkness of sin and it presses down on the soul trying to finish what it once began. The battle between the darkness caused by the multitude of sins and the light that was left behind in the soul by the Divine Presence is neverending but the light refuses to die and fights back. This is precisely the story of the Dome of Darkness and the Pearl of Light. It is nothing more than the representation of the constant battle between the human soul and sin."
"And when you asked me if I knew what the saying of the Bible meant?"
"Once upon a time, there was God, and the Word was with God and the Word was God…"
"Emmanuel?"
"You catch pretty fast, Emily, I´m glad," Abraham said, praising me. "Indeed, Emmanuel is at the very heart precisely because in Him comes together what you just saw and what you heard a moment ago."
"That Man couldn´t be lost?"
"Indeed," Abraham stated. "The essence of God is Love and it is a Love that yearns to be shared. However, there are two things here that are important. The first is that this yearning within God desired beings with whom He could share this love. This was the origin of all created beings: angels, humans, and animals. The second is that from these three, He chose one with whom the relationship would go deeper, and for that to happen this being needed to have within elements of that God.
"The love that God had when He chose Man to be the one being that held both a spiritual and a physical element that would allow him to interact with both the physical and the spiritual realms made Him create Man with particular care.
"This being was meant to discover God and grow in love with Him through interaction with all created physical creatures and through his internal connection to God Himself.
"This connection appeared when God provided Man with the one thing that made him into His likeness and image, that is, the human spirit. This is because the human spirit is formed from the Spirit who is the very essence of God. What you saw in that mountain, that presence was real before the fall of Man, and even though sin caused the light to go out because it evicted the Spirit from the human soul, remnants of that Light were left behind and those fight off evil and sin all the time."
"And when I heard the voice saying that You could not let Man be lost? How is that connected to Emmanuel?"
"You have heard about the plan of salvation, which means, how God chose to become man in Emmanuel - or Jesus as He is better known - to save mankind. But what you have seldom heard of is that even before the fall and for all eternity, God had already chosen to strengthen and deepen His relationship with Man through the addition of the physical element. You see, human beings can feel because of their physical selves and this allows emotions that increase the strength of those feelings. A human being doesn't just know that he loves; he feels it and this allows him to interact with the things he loves at a very deep level. God, in His essence spirit, knows but does not feel. So, how could God intertwine Himself with Man in an inextricable way? How could God give Himself to Man and establish a relationship that went beyond the link between Creator and creature? By assuming flesh. Hence, why Emmanuel is the center of it all. In Him came together Divinity and humanity in an inextricable way and through Him, Man and God became intertwined forever. Through Him now Man can actually see, feel, and experience the God who would have been completely out of his reach if it weren´t for this.
"And when you heard that Man had to be saved, well, again Emmanuel is the center because that original purpose - of God assuming flesh to enter a really profound relationship with humanity - took concrete form when it became imperative to save that being that had been created. Even though original sin cut loose the Spirit and exposed Man to death and evil and the remnants of the Divine life within Man that remained became like a beacon. It became a constant reminder to Me of that original relationship that was worth saving. When Emmanuel died and was resurrected He restored the relationship but on an even deeper level and the two essences, the human and the Divine, became intertwined even more than in the original plan."
"So the pearl and the dark dome is the story of the human soul and its relationship with God?" I asked.
"It´s the story of how it was in the beginning and it was also meant to show you how your human soul is at this time. You are not fully good because unfortunately, original sin happened and its consequences cannot be undone. But you are not fundamentally evil as so many believe, because, in your very essence, you have the blossom of the original relationship between you and Me. And that dark dome you saw pushes down, it's true, and sometimes tendrils of that darkness can crack through. However, the darkness cannot overcome the light, even if it is just a remnant of the original one."
I smiled and looked back up at the darkness above my head. With what Abraham had now told me my perspective had changed.
"Am I worth saving, Abraham?" I asked in a whisper, more like a thought that had been spoken out loud.
A hand came down on my shoulder and Abraham exerted enough pressure to make me turn to look into His eyes.
"You were more than worth every single pain and suffering that We went through and We would go through it again and again for you."
"Does that apply to every human being?"
"Every single one," He answered. "Now, there are a few places for us to be and with this part of the adventure, I promise, you will fully see and understand the extent of the Depth of Love. Let´s go."
I followed in Abraham´s footsteps and the two of us rose through the layers until I soon found myself standing on the ground.